


The Closest Thing to Magic

by akaparalian



Series: Malec Week 2018 [3]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 18:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15249495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Heads of House aren’t supposed to flirt as much as Professor Bane and Professor Lightwood do, if you ask Jace, but maybe he’s just biased because it’s weird to see your older brother making eyes at his boyfriend while you’re just trying to eat your damn pudding.





	The Closest Thing to Magic

**Author's Note:**

> "Love is the closest thing we have to magic." 
> 
> Day Three of Malec week -- that's right friends, it's Harry Potter AU time! I kind of flubbed the age differences between the various Lightwoods here, forgive me; I just wanted it to make _some_ level of sense for Alec to be a professor while Jace/Izzy are still in school. 
> 
> For what it's worth, I'm pretty much 50/50 on Magnus being a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw, but I'm a total sucker for Hufflepuff/Slytherin romances, so. *shrug* Feel free to fight me on this in the comments; I always love to hear people's different rationales for how they'd sort characters and why! It's so much fun even when you totally disagree!
> 
> Enjoy! <3

Heads of House aren’t supposed to flirt as much as Professor Bane and Professor Lightwood do, if you ask Jace, but maybe he’s just biased because it’s weird to see your older brother making eyes at his boyfriend while you’re just trying to eat your damn pudding.

“Seriously, do they have to do that at _dinner_?” he complains to Isabelle, who just rolls her eyes at him.

“They’re just talking, Jace, honestly,” Clary chastises from the other side, sounding amused. Normally he’d be inclined to at least listen to his girlfriend’s opinion and give it some thought, whether or not he ended up agreeing with it — Izzy likes to tell him how whipped he is, and he’s given up trying to argue — but Clary thinks Alec and Magnus are _cute_ , no matter how many times Alec has taken house points from her, so she’s not to be trusted when it comes to this.

“They are _not_ just talking,” Jace protests, gesturing up at the high table at the front of the great hall, where the professors all sit — and where Magnus and Alec are pressed too close together to be entirely innocent. “Trust me, I know what bedroom eyes look like, and it’s _that_.”

As he speaks, Alec smiles dopily at something Magnus says, and a flush starts to creep up to his ears, bright enough to be visible even at this distance. Typical.

“Oh, you do, do you?” Clary sounds even more amused than before, so he gives up on her with a huff and goes back to just trying to eat his pudding and resolutely ignore the way his brother is batting his eyelashes towards better Hufflepuff-Slytherin relations. 

Seriously, it’s weird enough that Alec is the Defense professor now — he has been for the past three years, after he’d finished his NEWTS, but Jace, in his seventh year himself, is _still_ adjusting — and on top of that it’s very strange that he’s essentially the youngest Head of House in several centuries — the old one had croaked at a convenient time, and the Fat Friar has always _adored_ Alec and all but demanded he get the spot — but it’s a whole other kind of odd that Professor Bane, Head of Slytherin House and potions professor and all-around eccentric character, has been caught pinning him to the desk in his office about three times now. 

One of those times had been Jace. Seeing his brother with his tongue down Magnus’ throat had been even worse than the 5 points he’d got docked from Gryffindor for “sneaking into a professor’s office after class hours” (read: forgetting to knock).

It’s not that he’s not glad that Alec’s happy — of _course_ he is, especially since Alec’s been so fucking miserable for so long. He’d had an anxiety attack at age 11 soon after realizing that being sorted into Hufflepuff, breaking a long and storied history of Lightwoods in Gryffindor and Gryffindor _only_ , would put him in quite a bad place with his parents when they found out. This assessment, of course, was quite correct. He’d received a Howler about it, which evidently even the Slytherins had thought was overkill, based on the fact that Magnus, at that time a third-year, had somehow sent a Howler right back to Lightwood Manor. 

“And it was all downhill from there, really,” Alec had said when he was telling Jace this story for the first time, years ago.

It hadn’t been a Howler that had come in Alec’s seventh year — Jace’s fourth — after his brother had told his parents just before leaving for school that he fancied boys. He’d shouted it out the window of the Hogwarts Express, actually, which Jace thought then and still thinks now is maybe the Gryffindoriest thing he’s ever seen a Hufflepuff do. The look on their mum and dad’s faces had, at the time, been priceless; he, Alec, and Izzy had laughed about it, with varying degrees of hysteria, all the way to the castle.

But then the letter had come — just a normal letter; Jace didn’t even know about it for days, because he didn’t exactly notice from across the Great Hall that Alec had received a single piece of post, for god’s sake. But he _had_ noticed that Alec shut down, hard, and for weeks the only time Jace saw him was by, once, stumbling upon him accidentally in one of the empty classrooms late at night, after dinner. Alec didn’t even notice Jace and a giggling Clary stumbling into the room fully intent on snogging, because he was too busy flinging jinx after jinx at a practice dummy stuffed full of straw. Jace had frozen in the doorway, eyes wide with shock, and nearly called out to him before Clary had gently pulled him away, shaking her head, her eyes suddenly sad.

“He needs time,” she’d said softly.

Jace had just stared at her dumbly. “Time for what?”

It turned out that Clary knew what was wrong with Alec, because Izzy knew, and _Jace_ was the only one Alec hadn’t told about the fact that their parents had told him not to bother coming home at Christmas or, indeed, ever again. They’d fought about it, eventually, Jace yelling “Don’t you _trust_ me?” and Alec screaming back “It’s not about trust, it’s just that they love _you_ ,” and all in all that row had probably gone down in some hall of fame or other. Jace wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s memorialized in the trophy room.

But that had been over three years ago. All the Lightwood children — well, except Max, who’s only just now a first year and so had been at home still at the time — had stayed at Hogwarts for Christmas, not just Alec, and Jace hasn’t had a proper conversation with their mum and dad since, just a few stilted exchanges over the summer holidays when he can’t get by with avoiding them anymore. All of this was long enough ago that, in the here and now, Jace feels perfectly within his rights to be disgusted by his brother being sappy and in love at the dinner table, even if it’s a different dinner table than the one he himself is actually sitting at.

—

“Your brother is glaring at us again,” Magnus informs him, taking a sip of his firewhiskey. Behind the goblet — and who drinks firewhiskey out of a goblet, Magnus, _honestly_ — he’s smiling his Jace smile, Alec can tell, the one that’s a perfect blend of exasperation, amusement, and grudging fondness. Magnus can bitch and moan about Jace blowing up cauldron after cauldron down in the dungeons all he likes; Alec is well aware that Jace has grown on him.

 _Like some sort of noxious fungus, perhaps_ , he thinks, catching his brother’s eye down at the Gryffindor table where he is — Magnus is right — looking balefully up at them as though they’ve spat in his pudding, and rolling his eyes at him pointedly. Jace huffs, though he’s obviously too far away for Alec to hear it, and turns away to talk to Clary. God, as though _he’s_ one to talk about PDA. Alec has been putting up with it for years and years now; Jace has quite a lot of suffering to do before they’re even.

Though the time he’d walked in on them in Alec’s office had been quite a push in his favor.

“He’s ridiculous,” Alec mutters, and Magnus hums in agreement. 

“Did I tell you, the other day was the amortentia demonstration for the seventh years?” he says, and Alec quirks an eyebrow, quite sure he knows where this is going. “So, you know, I had the cauldron set out on the table, and I invited them all to come forward and smell it, and your idiot brother got within six feet of it and immediately said — do you want to know what he said?”

It must have been good, if Magnus is drawing out the telling of it this much. Alec sighs, very much resigned at this point to Jace making a fool of himself in potions. The damn idiot is practically a savant in everything else — Alec would be worried about his own job security in DADA if he didn’t know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jace intended to try for the Auror training program — but for whatever reason, potions have eluded him for his entire life and show no apparent signs of becoming any easier as he ages. 

“What did he say?” Alec asks.

“He _said_ —” Magnus pauses dramatically for effect “—and I quote, ‘Oh, man, it smells like Clary’s boobs!’”

Alec chokes on absolutely nothing, and Magnus has to pound him on the back several times before he can breathe again. “He _didn’t_ ,” he wheezes. “Her _boobs_?”

“Yes, and poor Clary was right beside him, too,” Magnus tuts, though he’s shaking with laughter. “I can only assume that the smell was really her hair or her perfume or something, and he just — you know, is used to resting his head —”

“Right, that’s enough of _that_ sentence,” Alec says quickly, as breasts have never exactly been his favorite topic of discussion, and especially not when in conjunction with his brother’s head and possibly mouth and hands and possibly, oh god, other parts of his anatomy, Alec _really_ wishes he could stop thinking about this —

“That was by far the most interesting reaction I got, all of the others clammed up a bit after Clary nearly fainted and Jace managed to stutter himself into silence for once,” Magnus says, sounding very put-upon about it, as though he’d hoped to get _much_ more drama and gossip out of the seventeen-year-olds he was meant to be teaching. Which of course he must’ve, and Alec’s frankly a bit put out about it too, if only because half the staff are oddly invested in the student gossip and it allows him to keep careful track of his siblings’ well-being and love lives, so that he always knows which boys to glare at the most fiercely (the ones currently after his sister, of course, which usually turns out to be most of them).

“Terribly sorry for your loss,” Alec deadpans, and is rewarded by a chuckle and a smirk that makes him flush. Hopefully Jace isn’t looking up at them again — he always makes fun of him for the blushing, claiming it can be seen “all the way to Hogsmeade, Alec, you look like a bloody tomato!”

“You should be.” Magnus’ tone is very serious, but his eyes have a glint to them that makes Alec ever-so-slightly nervous. “I had to more fully demonstrate the scent properties of amortentia myself, given that none of the other students were brave enough to do it at that point.”

Oh, Alec never quite gets the chance to forget he’s dating a Slytherin. Kind of the top Slytherin, even. “Magnus, you _didn’t_ ,” he groans.

“Well, I didn’t tell them the _truth_ , of course,” his boyfriend laughs. “Sorry, darling, I just had to see the look on your face. No, I just told them it smelled like the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, and they got the idea pretty quick. Not to worry. I keep the real thing much closer to my chest than that.”

He says it with incredible bravado, and even winks, but they’ve been dating for a year and a half now, and dancing around each other for much longer than that, so Alec doesn’t miss the way his cheeks darken ever-so-slightly and he doesn’t quite meet Alec’s gaze.

“I should hope so,” is all he says, and moves the conversation on to something else, but he files away Magnus’ reaction for future perusal.

—

It’s not until much later — days later, in fact — that he brings it up again.

They’re curled up in Alec’s bed, just laying there quietly together on a Friday evening after a long week of wrangling teens and preteens with both the ability and the desire to, in Alec’s case, shoot hexes at one another and pretty much any other thing that moves, and, in Magnus’, spew frog’s eyes and spider legs all over the dungeons and explode an average of seven cauldrons per week, to boot. The idea that they still have separate rooms — that this is, in fact, _Alec’s_ bed and not _theirs_ — is a complete farce, but the Headmistress _insists_ that they can’t possibly room together officially until they’re married, no matter that she knows they’ve been living together at Magnus’ London flat for the last two summers, the old bat. But she can’t stop them from having regular ‘sleepovers’ — or, at least, if she can, she doesn’t, which is good enough for the time being, in Alec’s mind.

At any rate, he’s been lying there for well over an hour, Magnus next to him with his nose deep in some ancient and dusty potions manual and muttering occasionally under his breath, desperately trying to work up the will to ask about what he wants to ask about. _This,_ he thinks for not the first time, _is why I am not the Head of fucking Gryffindor House_.

Finally it all but explodes out of him. “Magnus, what does amortentia smell like to you?”

Magnus jumps, clearly having been thoroughly ensconced in his reading. He blinks owlishly and uncomprehendingly at Alec, lowering the book slowly.

“What was that, darling?”

Alec takes a deep, shuddering breath and tries again. “The — the other night at dinner. You were talking about amortentia?”

“Ah. Yes.” Magnus smiles, apparently still not quite understanding what Alec’s getting at. “Your brother made quite an ass of himself.”

While this is certainly true, and not the first time, Alec doesn’t want to talk about Jace. He waves Magnus’ comment off.

“Right, right, but you said — you said you had to tell the students what it smelled like to you, and you said it was my classroom, but you also said that that wasn’t true.” His heart pounding, he very carefully makes sure that he meets Magnus’ eyes, and his breath catches at the hint of nerves he sees there.

“Yes,” Magnus says cautiously. He’s getting it now, and Alec swallows hard.

“What—” he swallows again “—what does it really smell like for you?”

Magnus is silent, and all at once — and, he realizes with sudden shock, for the very first time; how is it that he, Alec Lightwood, king of self-doubt, has somehow managed to just assume that this conversation would go well up until now? — Alec wonders if he hasn’t made a terrible mistake here, if Magnus… if Magnus is about to tell him it smells like something Alec hates, or some ex-lover’s perfume, or — 

He startles when Magnus takes his hands, very gently, cradling them between his own like they’re made of glass. His book now sits on the covers, forgotten, and Alec staring into his eyes now is more a matter of inertia than anything. 

“It smells,” Magnus says very softly, “like woodsmoke, and chai, and the flowers that you brought me on our fifth date, which was the night that I realized I had fallen in love with you.”

Oh. _Oh_. It’s better and worse than anything Alec could have ever imagined.

“That’s why you spelled them and kept them in your study?” he breathes; he’s always thought it was just that they were a gift, the first gift, really, that Alec had ever given him, but this is so much more than that, so much deeper.

Magnus smiles at him. It’s a bit wobbly at the edges. “That’s exactly why.”

Alec has to clear his throat three times before he can get any words to come out at all.

“Do,” he manages finally, “do you have any left?”

“The flowers? Of course, darling, but they’re —”

“No, no,” Alec interrupts. “The potion. The amortentia.”

“Oh.” Magnus seems a bit bemused, but he reaches over to the nightstand for his wand and flicks it, and within a moment a little stoppered bottle of amortentia falls gently onto the bedspread. 

Alec picks it up with shaking fingers and almost spills it before he finally manages to get the cork out. It’s only then that Magnus seems to _really_ understand, which Alec can tell because he all but stops breathing. He closes his eyes and lets the scent waft toward him; he’s expecting it to be subtle, somehow, soft and warm like the feelings currently swarming in his chest, but of course he shouldn’t be surprised that when it isn’t. This is _Magnus Bane_ , after all. The scent hits him like a physical thing.

“Sandalwood,” he blurts immediately, which is so obvious that it almost seems dull, but it’s there — in fact, it’s dominant — and it makes him feel warm to the tips of his toes. The others he has to try harder for, but as soon as he identifies them his heart constricts almost painfully in his chest. “Um, and something spicy — firewhiskey, I think. And old books.”

They sit there in silence, staring at one another with absolute love pouring out between them, and that’s why it takes Alec so long to realize that there’s yet _another_ smell lingering under the other three. He frowns; it’s incredibly familiar, but he can’t quite place it. It’s like a sense memory, almost, and he thinks at first it might be related to one of their dates, like Magnus’ thing with the flowers, but that doesn’t seem right, none of those quite fit —

“Oh,” he says very quietly, and all at once he has to shut his eyes against the prickling of tears. “Oh, um, there’s another one, it’s…”

He can’t quite say it, in part because it sounds almost stupid and in part because it makes his heart feel like it’s twisting violently. Magnus gently takes the bottle from him, and the scent fades with it; Alec is hardly surprised to be scooped into his arms and burrows his head immediately into the juncture between Magnus’ head and shoulder.

“It’s okay, love, you don’t have to tell me,” Magnus murmurs soothingly, stroking his back. “It’s powerful stuff, amortentia, even just the fumes. It’s all right.”

Alec laughs, a little wetly, altogether surprised that it’s come over him so strong. “No, no, I don’t mind telling you, it’s just — it’s a bit silly. Jace would laugh himself sick if he knew.”

Magnus chuckles dryly. “Well, Jace said that it smelled like his girlfriend’s breasts, so I think we can fully do away with his opinion on the matter, hm? Especially since he isn’t even here, and you know I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Magnus Bane, that is a flat-out _lie_ ,” Alec protests, leaning back to glare at him. “Or have you forgotten all the times I’ve caught you and Catarina gossiping at the Three Broomsticks?”

“Unjust defamation!” Magnus says indignantly, and they both dissolve into giggles for a moment, the slight tension forgotten as Alec leans forward to kiss him sweetly on the nose. 

But then Alec pulls back, and bites his lip, and quietly admits, “It smells like a Howler,” and Magnus freezes.

“Kind of like ozone, then?” he says, but his mouth appears to be working on autopilot; his eyes are wide with shock. Alec can only nod at first, but when Magnus still appears completely shell-shocked, he feels like he has to provide a little more explanation, to clarify, just in case Magnus has somehow gotten the wrong idea.

“I’m sure you remember the Howler my parents sent me when they learned I’d been sorted into Hufflepuff,” he says, and Magnus nods woodenly. “And… and I’m sure you remember the one you sent back —”

“— telling them their outdated views on inter-House politics and useless legacies were actively working toward setting Hogwarts back thirty years? As a matter of fact, yes, I do, Alexander.” He chuckles, sounding a bit more like himself, but he still looks uncertain, like he can’t quite see how this smell ended up in a _love_ potion. “You were _livid_ , as I recall. Told me to ‘keep my damn nose out of it’ and leave you well enough alone. You hated me for _years_ after that.”

Alec can’t help it — he gapes. Then, when gaping no longer seems effective at fully conveying his message, he shakes his head, slowly and nearly imperceptibly.

Magnus frowns. “What? It’s true, darling, no matter the current status of our relationship.”

“No, it isn’t,” he says, completely drawing a blank as to how this hasn’t come up before, how he hasn’t corrected this assumption, wiped it clear out of Magnus’ head.

“Yes it is. You refused to call my by my first name. The first time you were even really civil to me was my seventh year, and that was only because I was Head Boy.” Magnus is sounding increasingly confused, but also put out, which is the part that makes Alec move closer to him again, clutching his hands tightly.

“No, no, no. God, I can’t believe I haven’t _told_ you this,” he says urgently. “I’m so sorry. I’m a horrible boyfriend. Magnus, I had an _enormous_ crush on you.”

Utter silence. Then: “Pardon?”

“I did!” Magnus is looking at him like he’s grown not just one, but possibly two or three additional heads. “From the very first night, at the welcome feast, I saw you sitting at the Slytherin table and — well, I hadn’t exactly figured out that I was gay yet, but you were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. And I kept seeing you in the hallways, and then a week later, I got that Howler, and everyone was watching and I knew you must have been watching too, but I couldn’t bear to look, and then you just — stood up and started waving your wand around and screaming into the parchment about how, how my parents should be _honored_ to have a loyal, hardworking son, even though you didn’t even _know_ me, and I —”

“But you acted like you hated me!” Magnus exclaims, eyes still blown wide, interrupting Alec’s babbling rant.

Alec throws his hands into the air. “Because I was _embarrassed_ , you idiot! The boy I couldn’t figure out why I was obsessed with had defended my honor against my own parents in front of quite literally all of Hogwarts, over _breakfast_! I wanted to sink into the ground and die!”

Magnus lapses into silence again, considering this for several long moments; Alec suspects he’s reconsidering every one of their school-aged interactions that he can remember in light of this new information. Finally, his mouth opens and closes several times before he simply says, “Oh.”

“Yes, _oh_ ,” Alec says, fondly exasperated, reaching out to squeeze Magnus’ hands again. “And by fifth year I realized I was very, very exclusively into boys, which explained why I had been so fascinated by you for so long, but you were Head Boy and I knew you’d never go for a little Hufflepuff fifth-year with spots and ratty old sweaters.” He snorts. “And thank god you weren’t hired on until I was, or I no doubt would have developed several unfortunate fantasies involving me coming in after class for extra potions lessons.”

“You’re saying you don’t still have those now?” Magnus says, as though he can’t resist. Alec flushes, becuase _he_ most certainly can’t.

“Not the point.”

“Oh, I think it is, darling, but we can circle back around to it if you like.” But despite that very familiar teasing, flirty tone, Magnus’ eyes are soft and watery, and he looks more raw and open than Alec has maybe ever seen him, somehow. “You’re telling me that — that all this time, you’ve wanted me?”

And Alec can’t help but smile. 

“Yeah, Magnus. I — I’ve been in love with you for so much longer than you know.”

And it’s impossible in that moment not to kiss him; it’s a slow kiss, heady and warm, full of love and tenderness and just a hint of teeth to reveal the burning desire underneath. But, as Magnus had said, they can circle back around to that. For now, Alec pulls back from his lips to press gentle kisses to his cheeks, his nose, his forehead. 

“And here I thought I was taking things too fast falling in love with you after only five dates,” Magnus mumbles. He sounds awed. 

Alec laughs quietly. “You should know better by now than to doubt my ability to make questionable decisions and then stick them to them.”

“Commitment,” Magnus hums, but it’s barely a word at all, barely even a breath. He still looks a bit dazed, but he seems to be slowly coming out of it. “I can’t believe I let you get a — what, _seven_ year head start?”

“Well, I can think of a few ways you could get started on making up for lost time,” Alec tells him, but the words are soft rather than sultry, and when he clutches Magnus to his chest, the way his arms loop around him is pure contentment, warmth and surety.

Magnus leans into him to return the embrace, and then they don’t really move for a long, long time.

—

Jace is just trying to drink his orange juice. His perfectly innocent, unassuming orange juice.

“How are they _even gooier than normal_?” he groans, buttering a slice of perfectly browned toast (thank you, house elves). “I didn’t think that was _possible_.”

Isabelle arches a brow and grins. “Do you really want to know?”

“Oooh, what did Alec tell you?” Clary interjects, leaning across the table eagerly and nearly putting her elbow in the marmalade in her haste.

Jace resigns himself to his girlfriend and his sister filling up the morning with gossip even though it’s ungodly early and reaches for a plate of bacon somewhat forlornly, because something about the gleam in Izzy’s eye this morning tells him he’ll regret it if he goes for sausage instead. If only because she thinks her jokes are _much_ funnier than they really are.

“Not the full story, I think, but,” Izzy tells Clary, leaning across the table to meet her in the middle so they can whisper together in the most conspicuous way possible, “what he _did_ say was that he, quote, ‘finally’ told Magnus he’d had a crush on him since his first year.”

Clary’s eyes widen. “‘Finally’ — you mean Magnus didn’t _know_?!”

“Apparently not! He thought Alec used to hate him!”

Which, Jace reflects, makes a certain amount of sense, really. While Alec’s crush on Magnus had been obvious to those that knew him well — even before he came out, and _certainly_ once he had — to everyone else it must have mostly looked like a lot of glaring and leaving a room every time Magnus walked in.

Still, he’d have figured it would have come up before now, seeing as Alec and Magnus have been dating and clearly disgustingly in love for well over a year now. Very, very grudgingly, he is forced to admit that perhaps, if what Izzy is saying is true and Magnus _has_ only just learned that Jace’s occasionally-very-thick brother has been in love with him for about half his life, then Alec and Magnus may have earned the right to a little bit of extra PDA and sappiness.

Maybe.

But there are _limits_. If they graduate from what they’re doing now — holding hands and smiling softly and sometimes feeding each other little bits of fruit and then kissing — to full-on making out or something, he’s going to… well, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Scream, maybe?

“ — what that conversation looked like,” Clary is saying, laughing, when Jace tunes back in.

“Not really our business, is it?” he points out. Clary looks a little surprised, almost, maybe at the way he phrased it; she shakes her head fondly and laughs again.

“Definitely not, but what else are we supposed to gossip about?”

Izzy makes a noise of assent with her mouth full of eggs, and Jace just smirks and rolls his eyes. They lapse into silence for a bit after that, letting the chatter from the rest of the Great Hall wash over them instead.

“It’s just good to see him — them — so happy,” Clary says quietly after a moment, and against his better judgement, Jace turns to look over at the high table again.

Magnus is saying something, gesturing grandly with their joined hands; even from here, Jace can tell that he looks just a little bit less put-together than normal, softer, somehow. His gaze is locked onto Alec’s face as though he physically can’t look away, a smile curving around his words. And Alec…

Alec has never looked so warm, so quietly and effusively joyful. He looks like the whole castle could suddenly come falling down around his ears and he wouldn’t even notice, let alone care, because he has something far more important to be thinking about. Because of _Magnus_.

Yeah. Maybe they can be forgiven for a little PDA after all.

“It really, really is,” Jace says, and turns back to his breakfast. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr](http://floralegia.tumblr.com) or [Twitter!](http://twitter.com/akaparalian)


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